Concept Engineering Introduces SGvision PRO

Concept Engineering today announced the release of SGvisionTM PRO, a mixed-mode debugging tool that allows system-on-chip (SoC) designers and verification engineers to more quickly analyze and debug circuits that contain both digital and transistor-level components.

SGvision PRO supports mixed-level debugging of SPICE and Verilog standard languages at the same time.

Many SoC implementation and debugging problems can be easily understood and solved when designers get detailed information and debug support not only from their pure digital components (Verilog), but also from the analog or library components (SPICE). Existing customers of the Concept's GateVision® PRO (for gate-level debugging) and SpiceVision® PRO (for transistor-level debugging) tools had been requesting capabilities that would allow them to analyze mixed-level descriptions with top-level structures described in Verilog and lower-level structures described viaSPICE.

At Credence Systems Corporation (Nasdaq: CMOS), for instance, a customized version of SGvision PRO allowed concurrent visualization of mixed gate-level and transistor-level circuits while providing cross-probing between the schematic objects and the physical layout objects. As MarkMalinoski, vice president and general manager, diagnostics and characterization group of Credence Systems Corporation, said, "SGvision PRO helped us bridge the gap between the design engineers and the failure analysis engineers."

SGvision PRO is an easy-to-use, very high performance and high capacity tool that is customizable via a tcl-based UserWare API (application programming interface), which allows designers to extend the functionality of SGvision PRO to meet the immediate needs of the project. The toolprovides the debugging features known from the existing GateVision PRO and SpiceVision PRO products to help reduce the complexity of the debug process and make it easier to understand and fix mixed-mode designs. For example, SGvision PRO helps to reduce the complexity of the debug process via its interactive logic cone navigation feature, showing just the critical portion of the design in one debugging window (the Logic Cone Window) while providing links to the original SPICE or Verilog source code at the same time. As a result, engineers can easily work on the important critical fragments of their project; are not disturbed by graphics and informationthat is not relevant for the job at hand; and get visual feedback about the design level (gates or/and transistors) that is most important to solve the current design/verification problem.

"Concept Engineering has always provided customers with an open and flexible tool architecture," said Gerhard Angst, president and CEO of Concept Engineering. "SGvision PRO is a powerful mixed-mode verification solution based on customer requests and our long experience with gate-level and transistor-level debugging."

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